Kant interpreters are divided on the question of whether determinate cognition plays a role in the harmony of the faculties in aesthetic judgement. I provide a ‘non-cognitive’ interpretation that allows Kant’s statements regarding judgements of natural beauty to cohere such that determinate cognition need not be taken to perform any role in such judgements. I argue that, in aesthetic harmony, judgement privileges the free activity of the imagination over the cognizing function of the understanding for the purpose of unifying the object, although the free imagination cannot violate the obscure concepts and principles of ordinary common sense.

According to strong metaphysical readings of Kant, Kant accepts noumenal substances and causes. Against such readings, Markus Kohl has recently argued that, for Kant, (a) an intuitive intellect is a decisive measure for reality, but (b) an intuitive intellect would not represent noumena as substances or causes. Against Kohl, I argue that the intuitive intellect might indirectly represent noumenal substances and causes, which is enough to save the strong metaphysical reading. In addition, I show how Kant’s apparently anti-metaphysical statements about the content of the categories can be read in a metaphysically friendly way.

On one reading of Kant’s account of our original representations of space and time, they are, in part, products of the understanding or imagination. On another, they are brute, sensible givens, entirely independent of the understanding. In this article, while I agree with the latter interpretation, I argue for a version of it that does more justice to the insights of the former than others currently available. I claim that Kant’s Transcendental Deduction turns on the representations of space and time as determinate, enduring particulars, whose unity is both given and a product of synthesis.

The subject of this article is a powerful objection to the non-conceptualist interpretation of Kant’s transcendental deduction of the categories. Part of the purpose of the deduction is to refute the sort of scepticism according to which there are no objects of empirical intuition that instantiate the categories. But if the non-conceptualist interpretation is correct, it does not follow from what Kant is arguing in the transcendental deduction that this sort of scepticism is false. This article explains and assesses a number of possible responses to this objection.

Since I agree with Schulting’s conclusions, my comments consist mostly of suggestions for further work that he could do, for example further issues that he might want to look into and passages that might give him trouble. One such issue is what is now sometimes called the Localization Problem: if the mind supplies temporal and (where present) spatial organization and most (at least most) conceptual structure to the manifold of intuition, what could be used to place bits of the manifold at one place rather than another, to determine that this concept rather than that applies, and the like? I urge that this in fact a very serious problem for Kant. Among passages that might create a problem for Schulting’s reading, I focus on the Refutation of Idealism, which Kant added to the second (B-)edition.

Chapter 4 of Dennis Schulting’s book Kant’s Radical Subjectivism targets those commentators who take there to be a gap in the transcendental deduction of the categories, arguing instead that there is no gap between the necessary application of the categories and their exemplification in the object of experience. In these comments on the chapter, I suggest a minimal sense in which the fact that there is a gap is non-negotiable. The interesting question is not whether there is a gap which needs to be bridged, but how and why Kant makes the step from subjectivity to objectivity.

I argue, contrary to Dennis Schulting in Kant’s Radical Subjectivism, that the main reasoning of Kant’s transcendental deduction of the categories is progressive, not regressive. Schulting is right, however, to emphasize that the deduction takes the object cognized to be constituted in an idealism-entailing way. But his reasoning has gaps and bypasses Kant’s most explicit deduction argument, independent of the Transcendental Aesthetic, for idealism. Finally, Schulting’s claim that Kantian discursivity itself requires idealism overlooks the fact that Kantian general judgements can be true in a domain of objects without being specifically of or about any particular ones of those objects.

In this paper I discuss four ways in which Schulting’s phenomenalist interpretation of Kant faces the challenge of accounting for the possibility of objective cognition. First, I ask whether objective cognition requires the understanding to be a faculty of absolute, not merely relative spontaneity. Second, is objectivity compatible with thinking of the transcendental ‘I’ as an indexical? Third, does objectivity require that the objects have being independently of the understanding? Finally, is it a threat to objectivity if objects can be given to me in sensibility without standing under the categories?